QPR chairman Tony Fernandes sanctioned £20.5m in player acquisitions last January but it did not stop the club being relegated. Photograph: Glyn Kirk/AFP/Getty Images

Queens Park Rangers had a higher wage bill last season than Champions League finalists Atlético Madrid, research by the Guardian has revealed.

Rangers' financial accounts for 2012-13 confirm the impression at Loftus Road that the club overspent for manager Mark Hughes and his replacement Harry Redknapp, in a vain effort to avoid relegation, producing a wage bill of £78m, 128% of the club's entire turnover. That culture of spending on wages, becoming steadily less prevalent at clubs across Europe, has been put into stark perspective by this season's remarkable achievement of Atlético, whose squad have reached the Champions League final on a wage bill significantly less than QPR's.

Atlético's wage bill has been reported in the Spanish media to be just €66m (£54m), this year – 30% less than QPR's, for a team mostly without acknowledged stars, whose stellar progress has been widely attributed to inspirational management by Diego Simeone. The club is not without its financial difficulties, having been reported to face debts of €500m and fallen behind on tax payments, and the reduction of the wage bill to €66m, with the sale of star players including Radamel Falcao to Monaco last summer, has been presented as evidence of necessary cost-cutting.

By contrast, QPR, taken over in August 2011 by the Malaysian airline entrepreneur Tony Fernandes and his partners Kamarudin Meranun and Ruben Gnanalinigam, having sacked Neil Warnock in January 2012, signed ten players for Warnock's replacement, Mark Hughes, that summer. After they sacked Hughes in November 2012, Fernandes sanctioned £20.5m spending in January last year and a further swelling of the wage bill on Christopher Samba and Loic Remy, Redknapp also signing Jermaine Jenas, Yun Suk-Young and Tal Ben-Haim.

Such drastic spending, in a Premier League whose clubs more generally have reined in some excesses of the past, produced a £65m loss at QPR, the deepest of all 20 clubs, but did not succeed in staving off relegation. Having failed this season to qualify for promotion automatically, QPR hope they can go up via the Championship play-offs, otherwise their financial situation will remain under siginificant pressure.

QPR's 2012-13 accounts show that the Malaysian owners, and the family of the Indian steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, whose son-in-law, Amit Bhatia, is on the Rangers board, had loaned the club £166m to enable this spending. The club's total net debt was £177m, the fourth highest in the Premier League.